National News Roundup

Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., the site of the famous
confrontation between federal troops and the state National Guard over
integration, has been denied national landmark status by the National
Park Service.

Officials of the Park Service, while acknowledging the school's
significance in the history of desegregation and the civil-rights
movement, said the Little Rock school system's request for the
designation did not include enough documentation.

The park service may, however, change its position after further
study, officials said.

Central High became famous in 1957, when then-Gov. Orval Faubus
mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students
from entering the all-white school, although integration had been
ordered by the federal courts. The students were admitted only after
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops.

The National School Boards Association has sided with the Seattle
school board in its fight to retain the city's locally initiated
desegregation plan.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this month, the school-boards
association claims that Initiative 350, a state antibusing law enacted
by referendum in 1980, undermines local control.

The school systems in Seattle, Pasco, and Tacoma have desegregated
without having been ordered by the courts to do so. The Seattle board
is leading the challenge to Initiative 350, which prohibits school
boards from assigning students outside their neighborhoods.

Initiative 350 has been held unconstitutional by a federal appellate
court, and the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case, State of
Washington v. Seattle School District No. 1. The U.S. Department of
Justice, which supported Seattle in lower-court proceedings, last fall
changed its position and has asked the Court to uphold the antibusing
law.

Although there has been some resistance to busing in Seattle, the
nsba's brief contends, the locally initiated plan is preferable to what
a federal court would likely have imposed had the district been
sued.

The Seattle school board, "which sought to avoid the adverse
consequences of court-ordered desegregation...now finds itself being
told by the state of Washington, and also by an inconsistent federal
government, that it may not solve its problems by itself," the nsba
brief says. "It must wait to be sued to do so....That such a
proposition defies all logic is self-evident."

Although there are no funds for elementary and secondary science
education in the proposed federal budget for 1983, the National Science
Foundation is taking steps to maintain some involvement in a field that
many observers believe has serious problems.

Pending approval by the General Services Administration, the
foundation's governing board will appoint a 15-member Commission on
Precollege Education. The members are to include scientists and science
educators.

The commission, with a proposed budget of $700,000 for fiscal 1982,
will conduct studies of science education, examine its status in the
U.S., and encourage both state and local authorities and private
organizations to help improve science education, according to a
spokesman for the foundation.

Numerous scientists and educators have called for the creation of
such a commission, which they suggested be modeled after the Department
of Education's Commission on Excellence. And the foundation's director,
John B. Slaughter, has a long-standing commitment to science and
engineering education, the spokesman said.

The foundation has cooperated with the Education Department in
creating the new commission, he added.

School districts undertook nearly $4.5-billion worth of construction
projects last year, a drop of 10.9 percent from 1980, according to a
national survey.

The School and College Construction Reports of Larchmont, N.Y., a
privately owned information service, also found that districts are
spending increasing proportions of their construction budgets on
improvements and renovations of existing buildings, rather than on new
schools.

School systems, however, are clearly anticipating an end to the
decade-long decline in school enrollments, said Paul Abramson,
president of the firm.

"A tremendous number of elementary schools are on the drawing
boards, indicating that school districts are beginning to feel--and to
gear up for--the influx of students that has been predicted as the
children of the post-war baby boom begin producing children of their
own," he said.

Mr. Abramson noted a few other trends revealed in the firm's survey
of school districts and colleges:

Almost no school district in the past few years has reported
building "open-plan" schools, while several have reported that they are
building walls to convert their open-plan buildings to more
conventional schools.

Language laboratories, which nearly disappeared from the survey
responses for a few years, appear to be making a strong comeback. Mr.
Abramson speculated that the new language laboratories include not only
facilities for foreign-language teaching, but also computer terminals
that are used in teaching a variety of subjects.

School systems appear to be using wall-to-wall carpeting less
extensively in classrooms and corridors than they did in the
financially flush 1960's and early 1970's, but carpeting is still often
used in libraries, auditoriums, and administrative offices.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the House of Representatives last
week would channel $1.25 billion in federal aid to state
vocational-education boards to train workers for jobs in
defense-related industries.

The measure, called the Defense Industrial Base Revitalization Act,
would reauthorize the Defense Production Act of 1950 and amend it to
provide for the strengthening of "domestic capability and capacity of
the nation's defense industrial base."

The bill was introduced by Representatives James J. Blanchard,
Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House subcommittee on economic
stabilization, and Stewart B. McKinney, Republican of Pennsylvania. An
aide to the subcommittee said its chances for approval are
"excellent."

One section of the bill directs the President to establish a
five-year national program in cooperation with "state boards of
vocational education" to train workers for jobs in "priority
industries" that face shortages of skilled workers.

In fiscal 1983, some $250 million would be available to state boards
that submit a five-year plan for training.

In the first year, the states would be required to pay 10 percent of
the training costs, including "in-kind" contributions of equipment,
facilities, or services. By the fifth year, the states would assume
half of the costs.

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